


the defector

by ache_fey



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, One Shot, Post-Time Skip, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), there's not a ton of sylvix in here compared to the Other Content sorry folks, this is a azure moon / crimson flower crossover event
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-27 03:21:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20941445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ache_fey/pseuds/ache_fey
Summary: Despite his preparations, he could not find the words to the script he had repeated in his head like a mantra as he rode through the Adrestian summer night, the weight of his actions burning hot and dry around him. Words stalled on his tongue, words with too much meaning, like “afraid” and “exhausted” and “loyalty” and “please.” Edelgard would not want those words, would not want him to bring sentiment into it — which was fortunate, because he didn’t especially want to bring sentiment into it, either.So he spoke simply, turning a terribly complicated thing into a subject, an object, and a verb: “I’m here to join the Imperial army.”Tired of fighting for Dimitri's twisted version of justice, Felix decides to leave the Kingdom Army for good. Sylvain tries to convince him to stay.





	the defector

He didn’t think he’d live to see the gates of Enbarr.

He always pictured himself dying in some rote battle over a minor fortress. Not because he wanted to and not because it was poetic, but because it was how most soldiers went. And as hard as he worked and as quick as he could turn his sword, at the end of the day, he was just another Kingdom soldier, wasn’t he? So, he’d always imagined he would be long dead, his corpse trampled into the ground, his body feeding the soil, by the time the Kingdom marched on the Imperial capital.

...and perhaps he would be. That day was yet to come, situated months or even years in the future. For today, he was alone, there before the high steel gates. Today, he was waiting for Her Majesty.

It was different than he imagined, the entrance to Enbarr — the gates were less regal and more militaristic, built tall and sturdy to keep enemies out. He preferred it to the unnecessarily ornamented architecture of the Kingdom. He liked that there was no pretense; even from a glance, you could understand it for what it was. And what it was was a holy city that, somewhere down the line, had shed its skin and become a fortress.

“You know, I thought the Kingdom had more sense than to send a spy I know the name and face of.”

As Edelgard approached the other side of the wall, Felix was surprised that she had not brought her guards with her — not even the ever-present Hubert was at her side. Moreover, she was dressed down; instead of wearing that blood-red gown that had become something of an emblem of her regime, she wore a white button-up shirt tucked into a high-waisted pair of blue pants. Nor was her hair coiled around that dragon-horn tiara she often wore, but rather it was pulled back into a slick, practical twist.

She stood straight-backed and impervious before the silhouetted skyline a city that worshipped her as a prophet, and yet, dressed as she was, she looked almost like a common girl.

“Your Majesty,” Felix said nonetheless, bowing his head, though his eyes remained fixed to her face.

He noticed an eyebrow twitch, the muscles in her cheeks tensing into just the faintest shadow of a frown. “Some people’s, but most certainly not yours, Felix,” she said as he rose. “What are you doing here?”

Despite his preparations, he could not find the words to the script he had repeated in his head like a mantra as he rode through the Adrestian summer night, the weight of his actions burning hot and dry around him. Words stalled on his tongue, words with too much meaning, like “afraid” and “exhausted” and “loyalty” and “please.” Edelgard would not want those words, would not want him to bring sentiment into it — which was fortunate, because he didn’t especially want to bring sentiment into it, either.

So he spoke simply, turning a terribly complicated thing into a subject, an object, and a verb: “I’m here to join the Imperial army.”

◊ ◊ ◊

It was an idea that had been festering for weeks, burning through his mind whenever Dimitri spoke of revenge and penance: he didn’t have to stay here. He didn’t have to sit through the prince’s tirades, to fight and kill on behalf of a madman, to hear him defile his brother’s name daily. He could run away, become a traveler or a mercenary or an explorer in a distant land. He could leave. What was stopping him?

Many nights, as he lay restless in his bed, he devised his escape — he would steal a horse from the stable at night and ride until Garreg Mach was hardly a speck in the distance. Or he would journey on foot, following lesser-known pathways to avoid detection and resting in thick forests other travelers dared not enter. If he reached water, he would strike a deal with a sailor, agreeing to guard his supply from pirates in exchange for passage.

Yes, he would travel by horse or foot or boat, and he would bring provisions from the kitchen, and camp under a stretch of canvas, cut from the stock in the Knight’s Hall, and he would dress in peasant’s clothing, burlap and sand-colored. From the council’s meeting room, he would take military maps to guide him through unfamiliar territories, and to maybe sell if he was ever short on cash. From the library, traveler’s memoirs that detailed fine oases in the deserts and areas rich with valuable minerals, and guidebooks that explained how to live off Faergus’s root vegetables and Adrestia’s fruit trees. Perhaps he would even take the Aegis Shield from his father’s quarters while he slept, just to make the old man angry. Or just to keep a bit of home always at his side. Or something in between.

They were sitting on the floor of Sylvain’s room, forcing down sips of warm mead in silence, when Felix first told the redheaded boy. The day had been long; it had begun with terse silence in the dining hall, Felix poking the back of his fork into the skin of his halved grapefruit while the others pretended not to have noticed the screaming that had come from Dimitri’s bedroom the previous night. It ended with Dimitri’s hand pressing into Felix’s windpipe as the boar muttered something incoherent about rats and vipers and corpses and Hell. And he would have let the prince kill him, too, would have let his body ease into unconsciousness quite willingly, if Ingrid hadn’t entered just in time, tearing them apart and holding the prince still with one fist at his chest while she sobbed wordlessly into the other.

A few hours later later, Felix and Sylvain were together in the older boy’s quarters, Sylvain sitting cross-legged on the ground, still working through his second bottle of mead, and Felix leaning back against the bed frame, legs splayed, finishing his fifth. He could plainly feel the skin at the front of his neck forming into a singular dark bruise, a spectral handprint. He knew it was horrible to look at, knew it was worse knowing who had caused it. But still, he despised how his former classmates refused to acknowledge it at all, making rigid eye contact with him as they spoke, as if it were an evil sigil burnt into his flesh that would place a deadly curse upon anyone who so much as glanced at it.

Sylvain was the only one who looked at it, who grimaced in solidarity when Felix moved his head too sharply and hissed at the pain, unexpected and fresh. When they drank together and Felix shakily pushed his fingertips into his pulse point, trying to see how much pressure he could apply before a jolt of pain shot through his muscles, Sylvain watched intently, his spine straightening when Felix cried out. And when Felix, face red with drink and anger, called Dimitri a “fucking bloodthirsty animal,” Sylvain did not chastise him, did not warn him to watch his mouth. He simply smiled, lips flat and lopsided, and slid him a rusty bottle opener and another bottle of the strong drink.

It was refreshing — the conversation, not the mead, which was vile. But the refreshing conversation and the vile mead made a peculiar sort of magic together, and so, Felix told him — suddenly, unplanned — as he cracked his sixth bottle open with a hiss.

Sylvain’s jaw went slack as his friend spoke, a familiar shade of peach crawling up his white neck, a splash of paint in a pail of water. It was the sort of expression he used to wear when Felix would tell him gossip he had heard at the Academy — who was sleeping with whom, who had a crush on which teacher. It didn’t carry the weight Felix felt a confession of this magnitude deserved.

But when he spoke, a few quiet moments later, his tone was not that of children gossiping. It was hoarse, and too high, and unsure. “You would leave me?” Sylvain asked. “You would leave your father? I know you hate Dimitri, but—”

“I _don’t_ hate Dimitri,” Felix interrupted, looking down as his fist, pale fingers tightened around the glass bottle he was holding. “That’s the problem. Part of it.”

“Then why are you doing this?” The peach hadn’t left his face yet. It colored his forehead, his hairline, the tips of his ears.

“Don’t talk like it’s a definite thing. It’s just… something I’ve been considering. I don’t know where I’d go, but anything is better than _this_.” He took another swig of mead. The drink was flat and sour, and he hated the feeling of it settling into his stomach, but still, he took another, and another, until the container was suddenly halfway empty.

Sylvain pushed himself up onto his knees, straightening his back and leaning forward as if trying to glimpse a detail in Felix’s face that he had never before noticed. “Look. Just because you don’t think we’re going to win doesn’t mean you should—”

“Shut _up_, Sylvain,” Felix growled, slamming the bottle to the floor with dangerous force; he was lucky it didn’t shatter in his grip and pierce his flesh. Still, he did not look down, did not even blink. Sylvain, on the other hand, winced at the sound, his high chest and raised shoulders deflating once again. “That’s not the point. I don’t care about — about winning or losing.” A moment of silence passed as he waited for Sylvain’s response. When it failed to come, he huffed, sharp and petty, and stood; his head eclipsed the one lit lantern in the room, casting his friend into shadow. “You don’t get it.”

“How can I get it when you’re not _explaining_, Fe—”

But by the time he finished his sentence, Felix had already slammed the door behind him.

◊ ◊ ◊

The inside of Edelgard’s quarters were surprisingly quaint. It’s not as though she lived in squalor, but the room didn’t have the illustrious quality Felix imagined all royal things had merely by virtue of being royal. There was a large bed, outfitted in plain cotton sheets, and an even larger desk, dense with books and documents that were stacked as neatly as they could be. The room’s only notable feature was a wide, crescent-moon-shaped window that looked out over most of Ebarr proper. In the yellow glow of the very early morning light (dulled in part by a thin cover of fog), the city looked peaceful and still, unmoved by the war raging outside its walls.

Once Felix breached the room (a momentous and terrifying step, for it felt very much like, once he entered this place, he would abdicate his right to ever go back), the Emperor shut the doors with a quiet click, spread the window’s silver curtains as wide as they could go, and settled herself onto the bed, gesturing towards the straight-backed desk chair.

“I am sorry I can’t offer you anywhere more comfortable to sit,” she explained as Felix angled the chair to face her, its legs scraping harshly against the floor. “But if I remember you as well as I think I do, you would prefer the security of conferring in my private chambers to the comfort of talking somewhere more public. Yes?”

“Yes,” Felix admitted, momentarily flattered that she remembered his nature so accurately. But could it even be considered flattery that the Adrestian Emperor would remember him and all his eccentricities? Or did she simply keep notes all her enemies, perhaps buried in the mountains of papers on her desk?

So he sat, hands joined loosely in his lap, and looked up at Edelgard — for, from her perch on the side of her bed, she was now a few inches higher than him. There, enveloped in that dewy yellow glow, she sat with her hands pressed into the mattress, her ankles crossed.

“I have placed quite a lot of trust in you, Felix, by bringing you here, alone, without telling anyone,” Edelgard said after a moment of silent, reciprocated scrutiny, her studious gaze trailing across his exposed arms, his hair (hardly neat after a night of riding), his armored torso, before settling, quite transparently, onto the now yellow-green bruise that stretched the width of his throat. “Offer me the same courtesy. Tell me why it is that you’re here.”

What could he tell? What was the truth? That a man he had once loved — loved in some inscrutable and undefinable way, but nonetheless loved — trying to kill him in broad daylight, on the same grounds where they had trained together as boys, had discolored his experience in the Kingdom army, ever so slightly? That hearing this same man call him by his brother’s name day after day, wearing a warmer smile than he ever offered Felix himself, may have hurt, just a little? That if he was going to die in battle — and, yes, he was going to die in battle — he wanted it to be for someone’s ideals, _anyone’s_ ideals, instead of for the pure and simple purpose of revenge?

“I need you to understand something first,” he said, staring down at his hands instead of meeting her eyes — instead of watching her eyes watch the muscles in his neck shift. “I’m not going to spill any Kingdom secrets. Those people — I still…” He bit his tongue. _Loved them?_ Cared about them? How could he say that to the woman who would some day order their deaths? “I’m not a traitor. I’m just offering my services. That’s it.”

“I wouldn’t ask anything more of you, Felix,” she said, and he wondered if the honeyed tone her voice took on was genuine or manufactured. “If you want, I can call on a general to collect you and take you to the barracks right now, no questions asked. Is that what you want?”

Despite her offer, Felix noticed that she did not move from her reclined position on the bed. Perhaps her notes on him were too thorough, then; perhaps she could predict his every action with such frightening accuracy that she knew, she _knew_ he would not bid her to call the general. That something was churning viciously in his gut, something black and poisonous that needed to be spilled, lest it kill him from the inside out.

“I just had to leave,” he said, voice low. “Everything was just so… fucked up.”

“As things often are, in wartimes,” Edelgard offered, an eyebrow cocked. “You know, Felix, I can’t promise things here won’t be equally fucked up. Whatever happened there, it could happen here—”

“No.” Felix cut her off, shaking his head and finally looking up again from his lap. He hated how raw he must have looked, eyes wet, the flesh of his cheek pierced between his canines. “It can’t.”

Edelgard paused for a moment, tilting her head to the side. He could see the gears turning beyond the thick white hair, the impenetrable skull, and wondered what she took his sadness, his insistence to mean. Surely, she was trying to use the few clues he was offering her to form a better understanding of the Kingdom army’s operations — and he couldn’t fault her for it. It was what any good tactician would do.

“I don’t mean to question you when you’ve just made me such a valuable offer,” Edelgard began after several silent moments, straightening her spine and casting off the casual posture she had adopted. “But why have you come _here?_ If your only goal was to get away from the Kingdom, couldn’t you have gone, really, anywhere else? I could offer you secure passage to Brigid, if you would like it. You could go somewhere you truly won’t be found. But here — here, you are not escaping anything. Here, you will have to battle with your demons — quite literally.” She punctuated this with a subtle nod to the fading bruise. “Is that what you want, Felix?”

◊ ◊ ◊

He went back to Sylvain the night he left. It was a little past midnight, and he knew the other man would be asleep by now, but he couldn’t imagine leaving without someone knowing, without trying to force someone to understand.

He tapped three quick knocks into the door and was greeted moments later by Sylvain, clad in his boxers and a teal nightshirt, yawning in greeting.

It was a stark contrast from Felix himself, who was dressed in full riding gear — boots and gloves and all, his hair tied into a style tighter than how he usually wore it. He pushed past Sylvain — a shoulder to the taller man’s chest — as he entered the room and took a seat on the bed. And he spoke quickly, before Sylvain had even turned fully to face him. Before Sylvain had a chance to admonish him for waking him. Before Sylvain could say or do anything that might, even inadvertently, convince Felix to stay.

“I’m going to join Edelgard,” he said, and his heart seemed to capsize in his chest.

Immediately, Sylvain looked as though he had been struck in the stomach. He all but stumbled backwards, eyes blow wide, so dramatic Felix was almost convinced he was making fun of him. But then he was running up to Felix with long strides, sitting too close to him on the bed, shaking his head. “You’re kidding me, right?”

Felix leaned away from the other man, acutely aware of the fact that they were so close he could feel the heat radiating off of Sylvain’s skin. “I’m not. I’m leaving tonight. I thought someone ought to know.”

“You can’t. You _can’t_.”

“Don’t fucking tell me what I can and can’t do,” Felix spat back, but there was no venom in the words. Instead, it was almost a plea — don’t tell me what to do because it hurts not to listen. Don’t tell me what to do because, goddammit, I might just concede.

“You can’t betray your country just to spite Dimitri.”

“How many times do I have to tell you it’s not about Dimitri?”

“Then _what?_”

“It’s about—” He shook his head, eyes squeezed shut, searching desperately for the right words, the words that would make Sylvain forgive him, that would make Sylvain understand. “It’s about not dying for nothing.” He opened his eyes again and moved closer to the other man, putting a slender hand on his shoulder. For a second, he felt like the Empress herself, a politician trying to convince his subjects to join an ignoble cause. It turned his stomach, even though he knew he was speaking the truth. “Dimitri wants us to go out there and die for what, exactly? The satisfaction of some ghosts that aren’t even real?”

Sylvain looked at the hand on his shoulder — not a reticent glance, but a purposeful acknowledgement. “I guess.”

Felix moved his hand to the side of Sylvain’s face, his palm settling firmly on the other man’s pink cheek. “I don’t have to do that. _We_ don’t have to do that.”

Sylvain turned his head back face Felix, who was closer, now, then he had been a moment ago. When had he moved? He hadn’t felt him move.

“Fuck, Felix. Are you about to kiss me?”

Beyond the sour taste of alcohol that lingered from supper and the dryness that sleep had left on his tongue, Sylvain’s mouth was softer and sweeter than Felix remembered. Maybe that’s because they were moving together so slowly, so fluidly; it was nothing like the biting, aching kisses they had exchanged in the past. It didn’t seem to fit the urgency of the situation — it lacked the clicking teeth, the wincing, the awful, awful desperation. And yet, as Sylvain wrapped a strong, sleeveless arm around Felix’s waist, it felt like this was the only plausible answer to an unasked question. Felix pressed his tongue against Sylvain’s lower lip, and the gates of Heaven swung open.

They stayed like that for many long moments, bodies moving against one another, mouths and tongues working quietly, steadily, slowly. They had done this enough time for the actions to be rote, even if the warmth and the pressure felt new every time. But when Felix slid a gloved hand underneath Sylvain’s night shirt at the small of his back, the taller man did something he had never thought of doing, not even once before. He pulled away.

“Felix,” he muttered, reaching behind himself to gently remove his friend’s hand and hold it against the mattress.

“Sylvain?” the other replied, his eyes opening with great effort, as if his lids were leaden.

“You know — you’ve got to know, I can’t.”

“Can’t?”

Releasing his grip on Felix’s wrist, he rubbed his palm into the side of his own face, squeezing his eyes shut, trying to reset something in his brain, in his heart, in his gut. “You know. We can’t.”

“Oh.” Felix’s posture immediately slackened, and he slumped backwards against the bed’s headboard. “Why?”

“‘Cause you’re about to leave me, Felix. It wouldn’t feel — wouldn’t _be_ right — it would just suck, you know?” Sylvain felt an unwelcome heat gathering behind his eyes. “For you to just… fuck me and leave.”

“That’s not—”

“I know. I _know_. But we just can’t.”

So they didn't. And Sylvain pulled a heavy blue coat over his nightclothes and walked Felix to the stable, untying the fastest stallion he could find that wouldn’t be missed too terribly in battle. His name is Otis, Sylvain told Felix, and his favorite food is apples but too much sugar makes him hyperactive. And if you approach him from behind he’ll run away, but he’s the nicest when he gets to know you, will sit on the ground next to you and loves the rain. And did you pack soap? And enough socks? There are rumors there are bandits if you take the South route, so take the North, and look out for watchtowers, and keep track of towns where you can get your weapons repaired, because there’re fewer of them in the West than you might expect, and for Sothis’s sake, stay alive.

And he didn’t say “I love you,” but Felix heard it.

And then Felix rode into the blackest, most starless night imaginable, and Sylvain watched him until he disappeared, and then kept watching, watching the stillness, for hours after that. It was only once Garreg Mach was hardly a speck of light on the horizon that Felix wondered what would have happened if he had asked Sylvain to come with him.

◊ ◊ ◊

Felix stayed in Edelgard’s room while the Empress disappeared into her closet to change into that outfit, that costume, all red and gold and white. All that was still left to be done, when she emerged, was her hair.

“Petra does it for me,” she explained with a smile. “It is a lengthy process.”

They toured the barracks; inexplicably, there was a room waiting for him — a large one, too, with an already-made bed, far from the ruckus of the dining hall and the training grounds (Felix was a light sleeper — he wondered if the Emperor knew that, too). She introduced him to the Black Eagle Strike Force, some of whom remembered him from school and some of whom did not (he, admittedly, hadn’t been the most sociable teenager). She had her finest healers examine his neck injury, as she so diplomatically called it (it occurred to Felix only then that for all the looking at it she had done, she had never one asked forthright where he had gotten it).

And that night, as legions of soldiers gathered for supper, she declared that this evening’s meal would be held in honor of their newest recruit, a former classmate whose assistance she was so very grateful to have. He sat by her, at the head of a long table of Imperial nobility and military leaders. He was served first.

It felt unnecessary. It felt insincere. It felt patronizing. It felt… it felt…

Well, it felt miles better than a hand wrapped around his windpipe had felt.

After the food was served, Edelgard stood to speak; the action alone silenced the entire hall. “Felix Fraldarius has done the devastating and arduous task of traveling half the width of Fódlan to join our campaign. Tonight, let us celebrate his arrival with champagne and roast goose. Tomorrow, he shall join your ranks, and you will treat him as you would any of your other brothers-in-arms.” She looked at Felix with a warmth that seemed truly genuine, a warmth he willed himself to believe was real because it was so much easier to simply believe. “You shall not ask him prying questions. You shall not look upon him with suspicion or ire. You shall trust and protect him in battle. Do I make myself clear?” A murmur of agreement rose through the hall.

“Thank you.” Her deceptively elegant fingers folded around the stem of her champagne flute, and she raised the glass, first towards Felix and then out towards the army at large — hundreds, thousands, smiling, chatting, and clad in bloody, bloody red. “Let’s eat!”

◊ ◊ ◊

Months later, Felix died brutally in a pointless scuffle in northern Imperial territory, with the axe of an Alliance soldier he had never seen before buried deep in his abdomen. As expected, his body was not immediately retrieved; it was stomped into the dirt, feeding the Adrestian flowers for several days before a cart came to collect him.

When the news returned to Enbarr, no one in the Imperial army celebrated his heroism, least of all Edelgard. They cursed his death. They shouted and cried and moaned. And then they swore to fight harder, not in the name of the ghost that was but in the name of the man who had been.

In a mass grave somewhere in the Empire, Felix’s soul rested easy.

**Author's Note:**

> i basically wrote this story because (1) i recruited felix in my black eagles play through and he has always been one of my favorite boys and (2) i truly feel like his ideals line up well with the Empire's? plus i was really curious what his and edelgard's interactions might look like. 
> 
> anyway i was gonna wait til i had more time to finished / post this but i've been Big Sad this week and writing it made me feel much better so here ya go!


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